When my eyes grow blurry and my mind grows dull and I find myself reading the same paragraph over and over and over, I look up from my stack of student essays at the framed photo standing in front of me and I silently plead, "Help me, Baby-Wan. You're my only hope!"Bringing along a photo of my daughter and granddaughter is the smartest thing I've done for this AP reading. Inside the room are hundreds of people silently nodding over essay after essay after essay, some inspired and some quite good but many simply mediocre, and I turn into a grading machine, open read read read shut bubble open the next one and start over, so it's easy to get sucked into the fog and haze and lose touch with reality.
But then I look up and see my adorable daughter and granddaughter and I'm transported to a world full of smiles and wiggles and overwhelming cuteness, and it's a very happy place. That's where you'll find me when the haze starts settling in. Don't look at the essays--look at the baby. Smile at the baby. Sometimes I think I see her smiling back.
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